College Question

("Postcards from Nowhere")

It's easier to know what you don't want to do than vice-versa.  I was going to college, but I didn't know why.  I mean, I knew why in general.  It was a bold new step.  I was leaving one thing for another, the familiar for the strange, the routine for . . . possibilities.  It was like the diving, though, like being in that cave and losing the line, hanging in the darkness and the void, listening to the sound of my breath, feeling the increasing beat of my heart.  I was an explorer.  This was adventure.  

I signed up for classes without much direction.  Vladi wanted to be a doctor like his father and we were skin diving and I liked the Jacques Cousteau specials on television, so I decided to join him in majoring in biology.  It was as simple as that.  It had the hallmarks of all my other career decisions--spontaneity, thoughtlessness, with a good dose of ignorance thrown in.  It didn't seem to matter all that much anyway, though, for most of the courses I had to take in the first two years of college were prescribed.  

The first thing I noticed about college was that the books were BIG.  And there were a lot of them.  It was thrilling in a way.  The size and weight seemed to lend seriousness to what we were doing.  They were expensive, too, and they were mine.  I fell in love with them right away.  These, I thought, were the markings of an educated man.  I remembered all the private libraries I'd seen in movies, walls of bookcases surrounding a desk with an emerald shaded lamp.  That was the world I was entering, I imagined.  

I got to school early every morning.  I liked to sit in the plush new chairs in the student center and look through the huge picture windows overlooking the lake.  From there, I would watch the sun as it climbed above the treetops, drinking coffee and finishing my homework from the day before.  I often thought of the coffee cart at the construction site, thought of standing there in the mud with other hardhats in the moments before going to work.  I thought of Tommy there at the very instant, he there, me here, and I could feel the despair and hopelessness of his situation.  As the mother of his upcoming child's belly became more swollen, the decision to get married became more pressing.  Either way, he would be condemned to work.  

For the first time in my life, classes were a wonder.  Not all of them, of course, but enough.  My favorite that first term was a philosophy class.  The professor was a thin, balding man who never really looked at us.  Each day, he would come to the classroom and pose some improbable question.  When he lectured, he paced the room slowly, hand to forehead, gazing somewhere else, never deigning to talk to us, it seemed to me, but to something else hidden deeply in the cosmos.  Whenever his gaze did accidently fall upon the class, he looked distraught and disappointed, and he would turn and close his eyes and begin his slow pacing once again.  

One day, he motioned to me and offered me a simple question.  Pointing out the classroom window, he queried, "You, do you think that tree is real?"  

Me?  Shit.  I could feel the blood rising right away.  I liked this professor and wanted to impress him, but I knew that the question was a trap.  I knew the obvious answer was yes and knew equally that it was too simple, but if I answered "no," I would have to justify it and I couldn't.  So, resigned to the beating I knew I was about to take, I answered.  

"Yes, sir.  Yes I do."  

The professor sighed and closed his eyes with the appropriate disappointment.  I did not look around.  The seconds ticked on, and after what seemed an extraordinarily long pause, he said,

"Son, why do you think that tree is real?"  

More blood, more panic.  

"Well, I can see it, and if I was outside, I might smell it, and if I tried to run through it, I'm sure I would feel it."  

Eyes still closed, hand still to forehead, he tilted his head back even further until he looked to be appealing to some distant gods.  And finally, he offered the final caveat.

"How do you know that is not just happening in your own mind?"  

Surely this guy was taking acid!  Hot damn, that was something, I thought.  Nobody had ever asked me such a thing before.  I imagined my father faced with the same question, the wry grin that would precede the laughing and the shaking of his head.  Nope, this was good, this was really good, I thought.  I like this.  This is the place for me.  

It wasn't that question, necessarily, that sold me on college, but it was an ingredient.  There were other more mundane things as well.  I never really grasped a lot of the concepts we discussed that term, but I was able to memorize things well enough to get a "B" for the course.  But it was all crazy and new and I was in love.  

My classes were over by noon each day that term, but I did not want to leave.  And so I would take my books and go back to sit looking out the big picture window, my pile of books beside me.  I am lucky, I would think.  I am really lucky.